Con Artists of Science

Can you get all the acclaim that comes with a great discovery without all the hard work that goes into it? John Sharp finds out.

As most people know, anyone involved in science, from lowest lab-hand to highest professor, is probably only in it for the fame. Physicist, chemist, biologist, regardless, all dream of smiling indulgently as David Letterman or Jonathan Ross waxes lyrical about how much he enjoyed their latest scientific paper, and then, later, perhaps retirement with some scientific unit to their name – or maybe even an entire chemical element.

There's just one snag – time. What with science becoming ever more complex, it's taking entire research groups years to make scientific advances, and that's not even counting the time spent smiling indulgently on Jonathan Ross. Luckily the history of science is littered with examples from our foremost scientists on how to grab that extra bit of fame on the side.

The trouble with science is that it just has to be so darn accurate. This means time wasted, checking and re-checking apparatus, making sure every test is fair, revising your hypotheses to fit results and so on. Then, five years later, someone else comes along with a bigger telescope/more accurate electron tunneling microscope and makes your work obsolete. It's all so unnecessary.

Trick 1: Steal it
In the 1980s, Michael Briggs at Deakin University, Melbourne was trying to understand the effects of the contraceptive pill. His work could have been held up by the fact that recruiting and keeping women to take part in studies on the 'pill' was hard. But he didn't let that get in the way, he simply showed a bit of 'initiative' and cobbled together some unpublished research (done by others), together with some research that hadn't even been done at all.

Unfortunately Briggs was found out, partly because someone smelt a rat when he claimed to have done some work on some beagle dogs in Deakin University, only for that someone to discover that Deakin University had no beagles, or any record of ever having had any beagles. He was disgraced and forced to retire to Spain.

So maybe stealing isn't such a good idea. But what about getting famous from paying for some ideas from your teacher? That's what French mathematician Guillaume de L'Hopitâl did.

Trick 2: Pay someone else to do it
I think we've all gone through a stroppy teenage phase of thinking 'what does teacher know?' but I'm also pretty sure most people get through it and eventually accept that teacher actually did know best. But buying cutting edge ideas from your tutor? Surely that's a bit implausible?

Mathematician L'Hopitâl managed it, and was honest too. In an arrangement where L'Hopitâl paid his teacher Johann Bernoulli 300 Francs a year, Bernoulli told L'Hopitâl all his discoveries and the filching Frenchman put them into a book, getting credit for L'Hopitâl's rule along the way (that anyone who knows how to find the value of the differential of a sine function at zero will be familiar with). Best of all L'Hopitâl's reputation is still intact since he published his book anonymously and even gave Bernoulli some credit in the introduction.

Continued...

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